In Times of Siege

by Githa Hariharan

  “I’ve called Amar,” Meena tells Shiv. “You remember Amar, he came to see me the other day. He is an activist and a committed member of several citizens’ groups. We have discussed the Current article and he thinks a citizens’ forum should take it up. I am supposed to ring him up and confirm when we can have a meeting here.”

  But it’s another phone call Shiv is concerned about. The phone in the living room is still not working, and Shiv can no longer wait to call Rekha. It’s already five in the evening. Luckily, Meena has been too excited and busy to wash in the morning. Now, as she pulls on her bathtime plastic to cover the cast, Shiv quickly calculates the time difference between Delhi and Seattle. The minute Meena hobbles into the bathroom, he picks up the phone, dials.

  The sound of Rekha’s voice—calm and poised in spite of being woken up—is infinitely reassuring. “It’s a beautiful morning here,” she says. “Tara is taking the day off to show me the Space Needle.”

  “But she’s just got this job, can she take time off already?” he asks, strangely reluctant to let go of the momentary illusion of normalcy. Rekha sounds so unsuspecting, so innocent somehow. How is he to shatter that even if it means sharing the worry with her? And where is he to begin, how is he to explain that his life may change—and hers—all for a history lesson?

  “Rekha, I told you Sumati’s daughter is here, didn’t I? Kamla has been very helpful, but she got sick and I’ve taken leave for a bit—just to help out.”

  “You’re going to help Kamla?” Rekha laughs. “Since when did you start helping with housework?”

  This is no way to get to the matter. Meena will be out of the bathroom soon. Shiv’s voice changes as he tries to keep it matter-of-fact and firmly under control. “Rekha, there’s a problem here.”

  But his voice has already alerted Rekha. “It’s not Meena or Kamla, something has happened at the university. Hasn’t it, Shiv?”

  “Yes,” he says, relieved, the words now tumbling out of him. “It’s one of my medieval history units—a lesson I wrote on Basava. I’ve read some of his poems to you, do you remember? But there’s some mad group called the Itihas Suraksha Manch of all things, and they’ve got hold of the lesson and they claim it has hurt their feelings …”

  Rekha waits in puzzled silence.

  “They want me to apologize and the university to withdraw the lesson.” Shiv pauses. Meena is out of the bathroom; her crutches are tapping their way to her bed. He manages an awkward laugh. “I actually got hate mail today, can you believe it?”

  Rekha does not lag behind Meena for a swift response. “What nonsense,” she says scornfully. “Sounds like rubbish to me. Throw out the hate mail and complain to university security. I think you’re worrying too much as usual.”

  “Maybe I am,” says Shiv hesitantly, willing himself to believe her. He sees that Meena has got into bed, freshly washed, wide-awake. “But I had to meet the Head and the Dean today.”

  Rekha has met the Head and refuses to take him seriously. How can she when the poor fellow is so solemn and deliberate that it takes him all of five minutes to say hello? “What does that Dean of yours say?” she asks.

  “Nothing much, it was mostly the Head who held forth. You know how he is. But I’ve told the Dean I won’t apologize, and now it’s up to the university—we’ll have to wait and see, they don’t want a controversy.”

  “Of course,” says Rekha a little dryly. “I don’t suppose anyone does.”

  Shiv suspects Rekha has not fully understood what is going on, but then nor has he. And he has not explained the kind of Arya-tainted atmosphere in the university. But still, for the moment, he stops worrying about the Head and the Dean and the unknown Manch. All day Shiv has been buffeted about, vacillating between disbelief and anger, amusement and fear. Now he sits alone in the dark garden, a lit mosquito coil at his feet, a glass of whisky in his hand. Though he has not begun on her list of things to do, Rekha’s garden is an orderly refuge. In its peaceful quiet, he can approach, however tentatively, the real issue at hand: how he, as a historian, sees Basava; and how he, as a man, is to survive this interpretation.

  Things standing shall fall, but the moving shall ever stay. Every word of Basava’s was a challenge, both to himself and to those around him. The heroic mode. In a building, in a city, in a man. In men, growing into empire. Who is a hero? A leader? What makes some of us speak out, draw others to listen?

  Where is the country that breeds heroes? Does it have a place on a map?

  As if he has heard his questions, Shiv’s father, meticulous answerer of difficult questions, wanders into his mind. Shiv knew his father for only the first thirteen years of his life. He has had to stretch memory, fill in blank spaces and obliterate stubborn question marks, to fashion his father’s life into a viable narrative.

  There are some things his father used to say to Shiv—often, he imagines, from the clarity with which he recalls them still. It is these words Shiv now draws on to reconstruct his father’s private mythology. Freedom. Values. The common good. “You must mine the truth,” his father would say. “If you settle for safety, if you choose to go along with whatever makes your life comfortable, truth will escape you completely. Shiva: there is a kind of person who lives like this. He is called an opportunist. Repeat the word after me so you remember it. Op-por-tun-ist.”

  Memory. Its relationship with history. How much memory should a historian bear on his back? In spite of his exhortations to courage, his father’s life—incomplete, cut off without a legible end—is a tail-less example of a man with too much memory. He was delighted to find that Shiv had inherited his good memory. “You must study history,” he told Shiv. “You must know the past with all its riches and terrors, draw on the lessons of both in equal measure.”

  But how do you seize hold of the past and make it yours? Who owns the past?

  SIX

  SEPTEMBER 8–17

  Morning, a clear day. The gentle blue sky is the picture of innocence. The curtain by Meena’s bed has been pushed aside to let the day in. Meena’s bed is a friendly, rumpled nest of sheets and pillows. Babli is in this nest, her face a mask of delight. Meena has given her a set of felt-tip markers all the colors of the rainbow, and she has hitched up her skirt to one side so that her entire cast is Babli’s canvas.

  Babli is hard at work. Her tongue sticks out of her mouth, stiff with concentration. She is growing an instant garden, a garden in the shape of a leg. A made-up garden, no relative of the one Rekha has commissioned in their backyard. Babli’s garden boasts brilliant blue flowers and extravagant orange leaves. Yellow-winged butterflies hang in the air, suspended in mid-flight. Their wings are tipped with brown oval eyes. A blazing crimson sunflower sits comfortably on Meena’s broken knee. Its petals are thick and succulent, holders of healing magic. Meena is in charge of the greening of this burgeoning garden. The color pen in her hand traces green vines. She connects Babli’s floating creations with a twisting, creeping network of veins, linking them all on the undulating landscape of her thigh and knee.

  They see Shiv, these smooth-faced guardians of paradise, but do not see that he is only a spectator at their innocent feast of colors. “Here, choose a color,” Meena invites him. She picks up a dark-brown marker from the bed and waves it in his direction. He takes it from her hand.

  The thigh and knee are now crowded, all the new tenants held in place by Meena’s green vine. Babli has moved down to the foreleg. She is drawing a full-blown flower, every petal an elongated swollen finger.

  Shiv perches on the edge of the bed at Meena’s feet. “Babli’s got butterflies but no bees,” says Meena with a grin. “Come on, we have a job for you. We need a bee for Babli’s fat flower.” Babli giggles and puts the last stroke on her flower with a flourish.

  Shiv pulls off the lid of his color pen. The felt tip smells of nail varnish, a mildly intoxicating smell. He bends over Meena’s leg and identifies the small white patch where he will import his bee into their paradise
. What he manages to draw is a nameless wormlike creature, hanging like a stiff umbrella over Babli’s flower. Babli then shows him how to complete it. Yellow stripes, fuzz, wings, stick-legs, waving antennae.

  His brief hour of reprieve, the comforting calm before the storm, spent in the secret garden of wise children. Then it all begins again. The world outside the small room stirs, raises its hood. The phone rings.

  …

  It is Menon from the Department.

  “Shiv? Have you heard what has happened?”

  “No, but it’s too soon for anything to happen, Menon. For once I’m grateful the university doesn’t move fast.”

  “But it has, Shiv. Didn’t Amita call you? I spoke to her and she was very upset.”

  “Tell me, then we can all be upset together.” (Shiv is still in the room with bees, flowers, one-legged girls. This is only his shadow holding on to a prosaic telephone.)

  A rueful chuckle from Menon, who then says, “It’s not funny, I’m afraid. Mrs. Khan told me she saw an official letter about you from the VC to the Head. The booklet containing your module is being sent for review to some so-called expert committee, all very hush-hush, no one even knows the names of these experts. And the Head seems to have decided that till this happens, students should be asked to return their copies of the material.”

  “But how can he do this on his own? The Dean said to wait for a few days and I don’t see how anything can be done without consulting me. I am in charge of B.A. History, after all.”

  “Shiv, that’s the worst of it. Apparently the Head and the Dean have been advised by higher-ups—not our university bigwigs but the real ones—that your resignation may be the only way to satisfy the Manch.”

  “Till the next time they strike?”

  “Yes,” agrees Menon gloomily. “It’s like waking up in a world full of Aryas. Don’t do anything hasty, Shiv. Will you come to the Department tomorrow?”

  “Probably. And Menon? Thanks.” It has suddenly dawned on Shiv how hateful it must have been for Menon, who never says a word more than he has to, to gossip with Mrs. Khan, make telephone calls, play tale-carrier.

  An hour later, he has the letter. It is exactly as Menon said.

  “They can’t make you resign!” exclaims Meena, the letter on her lap. That wretched piece of paper on her vividly painted leg: the proximity of the two worlds hurts Shiv.

  “No, they can’t,” he tells her. “That’s why I am merely being asked to ‘cooperate,’ as the Head puts it. To ‘bring the unfortunate controversy to an end.’ ”

  “But calling back the lesson? Can they do that?”

  “We’ve done it before a couple of times, but it’s always been a faculty decision. Never because of mob censorship.” Shiv frowns. “I suppose I could get legal advice.” He pulls at his mustache doubtfully. “But I don’t know if that will be of any use, the copyright of the module is with the university.”

  Shiv imagines his lesson sent to the corner in disgrace. Booklet lies upon booklet in the printing unit storeroom, waiting to be pulped. There is a warning sign that quarantines it from the other booklets, a sign like the ones on those ominously shaped vehicles carrying dangerous chemicals. Caution! Highly Inflammable Medieval History. Only known antidotes: 500 mg of blissful ignorance or 250 mg of unadulterated lies.

  Shiv’s booklets have been banished, along with the real—and troublesome—Basava. Only a sanitized Basava is allowed to remain, a “saint-singer,” a singer with a saintly face. This toothless man is safe enough to be hung on walls, a bland calendar memory. He is incapable of demanding shrewdly, threateningly, like the real Basava Shiv has glimpsed through the glass pane of history and poetry: If you risk your hand with a cobra in a pitcher, will it let you pass?

  The irony of it takes Shiv’s breath away: to sanctify Basava and gloss over caste, all in one breath! But it’s not as if the Manch is the first to distort Basava’s life and memory. The Basava Shiv wrote about, tried to introduce his students to, was a man who elicited extreme reactions, both during his times and much later. He was, all too often, either deified, or demonized. For the purveyors of magic (and their subsect of zealots) Basava’s life unfolds in a haze of legend. It was Lord Siva who sent him down to earth. The usual birth legends have been fabricated; the usual early-precociousness lore and self-sufficiency tales proliferate. Demigods are easier to co-opt into the pantheon of gods once they die. (Demigods do not end up as political prisoners; they do not end their lives in broken, disillusioned exile.) For the detractors and demonizers, Basava was nothing more (and nothing less villainous) than a bigoted revolutionary. A man obsessed with upsetting tradition. A dangerous man, a threat to structure, stability, religion. To the way things have always been, so the way things should always be.

  Wading through the numerous contradictory accounts of Basava’s life means parting several meeting rivers. Separating history and myth, pulling apart history and legend. Deciding which chunks of history will keep the myth earthbound; which slivers of myth will cast light, and insight, on dull historical fragments. The two have to be torn apart, their limbs disentangled, to see who is who; then coaxed into embrace again to understand the composite reality. Approaching the whole, the heterogeneous truth that demands the coupling of conflicting narratives, requires the participation of more than one body.

  But for the moment Shiv has no idea how to make the leap from his Basava lesson, or his own confused thoughts on reconstruction, to the eager, competent bodies congregating in Meena’s room.

  Shiv recognizes Amar, the tall young man who seems to be their undisputed leader, as the friend Meena described as a “committed activist.” Everything about Amar is on a big scale. All his features are drawn with bold, well-defined strokes. From a distance, he looks like one of those monolithic idols carved out of a single, powerful rock.

  Amar and his friends sit around Meena’s bed, drawing up lists of “progressive” historians, academics, journalists, MPs. The room is already beginning to look like a campaign office: headquarters. The phone is passed around, since all of them seem to receive as many calls as they make.

  “Getting the front together,” Amar kindly explains to Shiv. Shiv would like to help his unsolicited helpers, say something that will make their support worth their while. He would also like to assure them that there is no case; that there is nothing controversial about the lesson. Instead he mumbles something about tea for everyone and escapes to the kitchen, grateful that Kamla is not around.

  “What we need is a hard-hitting press conference,” Amar says to Shiv when he returns bearing tea. “We should move quickly so we beat them to it.”

  “Let me discuss it with my colleagues,” Shiv says. “Let me think about it a little.”

  If only he, Shiv, could be Meena or Amar for a day, distill all complexities to the breadth and weight of one sentence: “The same people who can’t hiccup without consulting caste rules don’t want it talked about in textbooks.” But instead, a cast like the one on Meena’s leg is being wrapped around Shiv, a cast that immobilizes him completely. It is not as if he is just being asked to prove he is a historian. It’s the other demands of proof—from two different corners of the ring—that freeze Shiv, slow his heart to a standstill. Proof on the one hand that he is patriotic, Hindu, Indian; proof on the other that he can say and do the right things, transform himself into a twenty-first century echo of the dissenting Basava.

  University calls back medieval history

  New Delhi, September 10: In a controversial move, the Kasturba Gandhi Central University (KGU) has asked its students to return a booklet of lessons on medieval Indian history. The booklet contains a lesson on the saint-singer Basavanna’s social reform movement by KGU historian Prof. Shiv Murthy, who has been charged with distorting historical figures as well as the caste system by an organization called the Itihas Suraksha Manch.

  The University authorities denied that asking their correspondence students to return the material amounted to m
eeting the demands of the Manch. A statement issued on Monday by the University claimed that “the use of the course material has only been temporarily suspended, pending review by an expert committee. The University stands by the academic credentials of all its faculty, including Prof. Shiv Murthy, who is a senior member of its History Department.”

  A deep-rooted conspiracy, say Manch leaders

  New Delhi, September 11: The leader of the Itihas Suraksha Manch, Mr. Anant Tripathi, today described Prof. Shiv Murthy’s lesson on Basavanna as “part of a deep-rooted conspiracy to defame Hindu saints in particular and Hindu history and culture in general.”

  He charged Prof. Murthy with deliberately picking up controversial strands of the Indian past like caste and targeting brahmins and temples in his version of history. “There have been attempts for quite some time by so-called secular people, all of whom are interested in obtaining foreign funding, to project Hinduism in an incorrect and defamatory manner.”

  He refused to comment when asked if non-historians could judge learning material produced by qualified scholars, or when asked if this was censorship of liberal voices in academia.

  Call to revive Hindu courage

  New Delhi, September 12: Following a statement yesterday by Mr. Anant Tripathi of the Itihas Suraksha Manch, the junior vice-president of the Manch gave a call to “revive Hindu courage.”

  “We have to shed the cowardice that has grown in us with Muslims, then Europeans storming Indian shores. Though Hindus were among the bravest of the ancient peoples, repeated outside conquests have made them cowards. Even Mahatma Gandhi said so. We want to make the Hindu strong and courageous again. A meek person cannot survive. I am not only talking about muscle power. We must return to our old militant spirit if the Hindu nation is to become great again. We must spread moral and spiritual strength in the younger generation by taking teachings of courage and valor to schools and colleges.”